La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  “He’s one of the finalists,” she told me with a smile. A moment later I was sitting next to Señor Calvo, who was in a big white shirt and wide black pants, watching two children fight.

  Macha pointed out his son. Cristóbal was slight and dark. He could-n’t have been over seven years old. He and his opponent were flying through the air, falling and rolling on the wooden floor, and then they were back up, uncomplaining, to attack again. They looked like birds or fighting cocks. I caught a glimpse of a hand on Macha’s son’s chin. His head went backward and I thought I saw the other boy grab Cristóbal’s raised arm; a quick spinning motion and then Cristóbal was on the ground, immobilized, with his arm stretched out.

  “Ryokatatori ikkyo,” Macha exclaimed. “Impeccable execution.”

  “Your son lost . . .”

  “Well, what can you do. He came in second. He fought well. His sensei is excellent.”

  After the recognition ceremony I saw a tide of children and teenagers go by in robes and wide white pants on the way to the changing rooms. Cristóbal ran to find his father, who lifted him up in a hug. He greeted me with forced indifference. He told Macha his mother was coming to pick him up. Macha congratulated him and gave him a good-bye hug before disappearing into the locker rooms. He came back five minutes later with wet hair, black jeans and shirt, bag over his shoulder and leather jacket in hand. “Let’s go,” he told me, and started walking quickly.

  Cristóbal came running over and took his hand. Macha said good-bye to him again, but the boy wanted to walk him to the motorcycle. We went past the woman at the entrance and filed down the dark hallway, the two of them in front of me. The door to the street opened. Macha stopped. Against the outside light was the silhouette of a woman, who barely greeted Macha and hugged Cristóbal. Her Chanel perfume invaded my nostrils. Macha introduced me as “a colleague” and she reached out her fat hand to me almost with disgust.

  She looked older than Macha. She had brown hair and green eyes. Cristóbal had inherited those big, light eyes. Other than that, starting with his eyelashes, he was purely his father. She must have once had good breasts, but wrinkles and sunspots had formed on them, and the eye could intuit their gelatinous consistency. Close to her belt there was a roll of flesh. The two-piece suit she was wearing didn’t help her at all, of course. The pant legs, thick and very white, ended in a pair of low heels with severe lines. The two of them stayed there, silhouetted in the doorway. Cristóbal and I went back through the hallway. She was saying something to Macha about her mother’s birthday, that it was already past two . . . The tone was of barely contained rage. I turned around and looked at them. Macha said something I couldn’t make out. Her nostrils flared. She raised her chin and pointed an accusatory finger. Cristóbal gave me his hand and we went farther back along the hallway. Her shrill voice was getting louder. Macha answered her softly.

  We sat down on a rat-colored sofa, between the refrigerator and the fat woman with the bun who watched over the entrance. I asked Cristóbal if he had plans for his vacation. He told me in a firm voice that he wanted to go with his father on the motorcycle to Yelcho.

  “Something bad happened the last time we went camping. But it wasn’t in Yelcho.”

  He says it after a pause and with that gravity children are capable of.

  “What was it?”

  “My dad and I went to the mountains. My dad took me there. We went with two mule drivers. We drank mate. Everyone from the same straw and you couldn’t move it. I thought that was gross. One of the herders had a scab on his lip. That was really gross. The guy was dirty and he smelled bad. But my dad told me I had to grin and bear it, so I did. We went on horseback for lots of days. We went up the Cuesta de las Lágrimas and there was a huge, huge cliff. If the horse slips and you fall over the cliff, there’s nothing left of you. That’s what they told us. The little horse path was like this, this narrow.”

  “Dangerous, huh?”

  “But that wasn’t the bad thing. The bad part was when we came to a lake and there were some ducks.”

  “And? Were the ducks pretty?”

  “The ducks were really pretty, they had green feathers in their wings. And they were all quiet in the water. They weren’t afraid of us at all. I thought we should hunt them. I asked my dad for the rifle. I asked if we could try shooting for real. My dad didn’t want to. Then the herder with the gross scab on his lip, said: ‘Go on and let him, boss. Come on over here, I’ll show you how.’ And he went to grab the rifle from my dad. But when he tried to take it, my dad held on to it. ‘Hey, OK, I’ll teach him,’ he said. He showed me how to aim. I’d already gone shooting at the firing range with my dad. Revolver and pistol. Never a rifle. It was really heavy. The trigger was hard to pull and the rifle moved and the duck I was aiming at was getting away. Then all of a sudden you heard the shot and the butt of the rifle hit me in the shoulder. The ducks flew away and disappeared in the sky. I looked at the lake and there was only one left. It was lifting up one wing, but not the other. It went on floating, like that, tilted over.

  “‘Dad! The duck. . .’

  “My dad looked at me really serious.

  “‘We have to kill it, son.’

  “I shouted ‘No!’ It was awful.

  “‘That duck is suffering. It’s going to die anyway, Cristóbal. It won’t be able to find food like that. Do you want to make it suffer? We have to kill it.’

  “Then I threw myself on the ground and started to cry. The duck, tilted over, went on swimming in a circle. It didn’t make noise. It kept swimming so calmly . . . He fired a shot. The duck fell over. My dad lowered the rifle. I jumped on him, kicking and punching him. I went crazy. I wanted to kill him. I was screaming and crying. Later that night when I was falling asleep, my dad came over to my sleeping bag. He told me again that it would have been worse to leave the poor duck in pain.

  “‘How do you know? Maybe it would have gotten better,’ I told him, and I didn’t talk to him again until we got back to Santiago.”

  Cristóbal looks at me, and I see all that he is right there in his eyes.

  In the doorway the argument went on. We couldn’t hear what they were saying very well, but she seemed beside herself. A red vein was pulsing in her forehead. Macha’s head was bowed.

  “Why do they argue so much?”

  “It’s ’cause my mom doesn’t want to let me go to Yelcho with my dad over vacation. But don’t worry. This always happens. I’m going to have to convince her myself, later on.”

  A friend of Cristóbal’s came over and I took the opportunity to say good-bye. Macha and his ex-wife had moved away from the door and were still wrapped up in their argument. He was trembling like a rabbit. I didn’t have any problems leaving without them seeing me. When I got to my apartment, I opened a can of beer, threw myself on the bed, and turned on the TV. A slow, boring movie. My mind wandered.

  FIFTY-NINE

  I thought the noise of the lock was coming from that bad movie, so I was terrified when I heard footsteps in the living room. The door to my room opened: Macha. While my heart was doing somersaults he showed me his lock pick and smiled. He made some delicious hot ham and cheese sandwiches that we devoured with a couple of beers, and I made Turkish coffee.

  I asked him why he was so afraid of that witch. We were on the black leather sofa and I could smell his animal smell. He told me it was because of the boy, because of Cristóbal; his mother tried to keep them apart, she was furious at the poor kid for wanting to be with his father. So she punished him out of pure malice, and of course that only made Cristóbal want to be with his father more. But there was nothing to be done about it. The law gave custody to the mother.

  He told me that she ran her house with “managerial” efficiency. Cristóbal was very lonely, he said. He had almost no friends. Macha was afraid of her power to do damage, even if she damaged herself in the process. She didn’t give a shit. She was a vengeful and bitter woman. That’s how he saw her. And Cristóbal had ins
omnia, he had terrifying nightmares. And Macha was never there with him. He had given him a short-wave radio and Cristóbal kept it on his bedside table. He loved that, being a radio ham. That way they could talk at any hour of the night. But when he had insomnia or nightmares or problems with his mother, Cristóbal didn’t call him, he said. He didn’t understand why.

  He asked me for another beer and he drank it quickly. Then he started taking photos of me. I walked around the apartment pursued by the lens of his Minolta. I sat down, ran, looked out the window, I rested my head on the back of a chair, I knelt down, looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, I got up onto the sofa. Behind his Minolta, his beard cut even with the skin—a close, level, bluish beard—and his cleft chin. I touched his arm as I said something, or I said “you” with a pointed finger on his chest. A few long hairs were peeking out of the neck of his shirt. His smell welcomed me now. His intimacy. Like I’d entered into his cave. He gaze held mine. I knew what was going to happen. Maybe.

  And he was following me and saying: “Hold up your hair, like that, pull it back.” And he was saying: “What will make a face like yours pretty?” And: “What do you feel when you’re on the motorcycle going full speed?” And: “Don’t laugh.” And I held back my laughter for an instant, fighting with it until I gave in. And as soon as the laughter escaped, again, in a soft and very low voice, coming from under his moustache black as coal: “Don’t laugh.” And those were, he would tell me later, the best pictures.

  “I like your boots, that rough material . . .”

  “Buffalo,” he says. “From Argentina.”

  And suddenly:

  “What do you know about Bone?”

  “Maybe something, maybe nothing,” I say. His hand is removing the lens. “I know he’s the one who coordinates the organization.”

  “We all know that. Get me another beer,” he says, leaving the camera on the table in the living room. We’re face to face. We clink glasses. I feel that at that moment I matter to him.

  “Tell me something,” I say. “I’m still an intellectual, you know? A spectator of life. I’ve never killed anyone. What’s it like? What happens to you inside?”

  I actually dared to ask him that candid question. Macha Carrasco, you know, gave the impression that he was one of those people who doesn’t ever doubt. His actions didn’t arise from mental deliberation but from a throbbing, a dark compulsion. That’s why I asked him that. I would never have asked it of a banal Eichmann-style bureaucrat of extermination—because of course, Central was full of those little gray ants in the service of terror.

  “It depends,” Macha tells me calmly. I’m looking at his eyelashes, the lashes of a pony. “The first time you kill, you kill two men with the same bullet. The one you kill and the one you were up until then. They don’t teach you that at the Military Intelligence School.”

  “And afterward?”

  “Afterward? Then nothing ever makes you feel more alive than killing again. At the same time: it’s dirty, there’s nothing romantic about it. Never. The enemy, once he’s dead, was never your enemy. He looks like a pathetic accident victim.”

  He fixes his eyes on me. When he looks at you like that there’s nothing else in the world but you and him.

  “I heard a story once. Canelo told it to me.”

  And I know I shouldn’t tell him what I’m going to tell him. Why? I contradict myself. I try to control myself. It’s a familiar vertigo by now, the one that’s taking hold of me. I can’t resist the temptation to tell him something I know, something Canelo told me, something Canelo shouldn’t have told me just as I shouldn’t tell Macha this secret now. But revealing a secret is delicious.

  “He talked to me one night about this extraordinary guy,” I tell him. “Attractive and brilliant,” I say. “A born leader. He’d just gotten his degree in medicine, Canelo told me, and he was chosen to go to Cuba. In the seventies. First in his class at Camilo Cienfuegos Military School. Everyone who knew him at that time agreed that he was destined for great things. His maturity in spite of how young he was, his theoretical and strategic knowledge, his specialization in clandestine struggle and sabotage, his physical dexterity, his political ability, his integrity, his innate intelligence, his kindness. He was the best of all of us, Canelo told me. Until the night of the accident. No one, they say, had his charisma.

  “It was at a party, the graduation party for his class at the Havana Libre Hotel. You know, the old Hilton hotel during the time of Batista, with its great hall, its gigantic dome lit up over the pool. He was headed for the Bolivian sierra. He would leave two days later to fight alongside Che. He was going as a military doctor, no less. He was talking animatedly—very animatedly—with a very beautiful woman. Then they were dancing. Then their arms were around each other and they were looking at each other and smiling for no reason, and then it seemed like they were about to kiss or maybe they were already kissing.

  “A mahogany table went rolling across the floor, with its old tablecloth of good, mended cotton, and then everything was crashing plates and smashing glasses. There was a shot and a window shattered. A captain of the armed forces was aiming his gun at the Chilean. There was a movement too violent and fast to be described, a feint, a jump, and an expert kick, and the jealous man fell to the floor. His 9mm Makarov PMM slid across the floor.

  “You could have chewed the silence. All the students focused on the steel that was waiting there on the floor. The young Chilean official moved slowly over to it. His adversary, behind him and to one side, was getting up with difficulty. You could hear his footsteps on the cream-colored ceramic tiles of the Havana Libre Hotel. He was going to pick up the Cuban captain’s Makarov, his steps sure and calm. His new black boots of a recently graduated official creaked.

  “Then the pistol skidded out of his path, sliding quickly over the gleaming ceramic. Someone had kicked it. Another shot rang out in the room and the Chilean bent double and collapsed to the floor. The bullet had shattered a vertebra. The Cuban doctors saved his life.

  “I never found out his name. Canelo didn’t tell me. I only know that he survived and spent two years hospitalized in Cuba, he was paralyzed, and he returned to Chile at the start of Allende’s thousand days.”

  “He’s our man,” said Macha. And his black eyes shone the way black marble shines. And after a silence: “This has to stay between us. Is that clear? No one else. Clear? Tell no one.”

  I never saw the photos he took of me that day.

  SIXTY

  Mono Lepe looked at me with his dark-ringed eyes, then up at the post, measuring the distance. He clambered up easily and used pliers to cut the telephone lines. That disconnected the alarm, too. It was three thirty. Operation “Night of the Wild Boar” had commenced. Lepe also cut the electricity lines. They had gotten the blueprints to the house from City Hall. A couple of minutes later I made out a few pulses of light from a flashlight in the darkness of the night. They came from up above, on the other side of the house. Mono had already met up with Pancha, who had a radio. She had arrived a while earlier and gotten in position on the roof of a neighboring house. The siege was in place around the perimeter. That’s what they were saying, those lights turning off and on from the roofs, which Macha answered with his own flashlight. Macha didn’t put much trust in technology when he conducted operations. Indio Galdámez went up to the solid front door. It wasn’t the kind you could just knock down with a kick. He tried his lock pick. It didn’t work. He took out a second pick: no go. Great Dane let out a bellow of rage.

  “How could you not try the picks first, Indio?”

  Galdámez didn’t answer. He tried a third.

  “They’re locks from that Spanish company, Azbe, with an HS-6 safety cylinder. The picks won’t work,” he said.

  “Motherfucker!” growled Great Dane. “How the fuck did you not . . .”

  “Let’s move on to plan B,” Macha interrupted: “Bring the jack.”

  He checked the time, got into his car,
and picked up the radio. I was close by, and very excited.

  “You woke me up, Dad,” I managed to hear. “Is something wrong? Over.”

  “Are you asleep, son? Do you copy? Over.”

  “Yes, I copy. No, I’m waking up now. Did something bad happen? Tell me, Dad. Are you OK? Over.”

  “I’m great, how are you? How was your day at school? Did you win the game? Over.”

  “We tied one to one. And I almost scored a second goal. I headed a corner shot, dad. A header that hit the crossbar . . . We would’ve won, Dad. Over.”

  “Good man! In the rematch, that header will be a goal. Over.”

  “You think that could happen? Over.”

  “Sure, of course it could happen. Listen to me, Cristóbal: Do you copy? Over.”

  “Yes, Dad, I copy.”

  “I want to congratulate you. And now you need to go back to sleep, OK?”

  “But do you really think that’ll happen, Dad? Another corner shot the same way in the rematch, and I’ll be right there, Dad, and I’ll head the ball in?”

  “Not likely, but yes, it could happen. The point is that in the next game you’ll score a goal. I’m sure of it. Now, go to sleep.”

  “Hey, Dad, why’d you call me so late? Did something happen?”

  “No. I just wanted to know how the game went, that’s all. And now, go back to sleep. Over.”

  “Yeah, I’m going back to sleep now. Over.”

  “Good night. Over and out.”

  Great Dane was panting. His long, blond hair moved like ostrich feathers on a helmet. He snatched away the simple car jack that Indio Galdámez brought over, and with his giant hands he fitted it midway up between two bars in a window. When he turned the lever and put pressure on the bars, the jack let out a little metallic whine that was unsettling. Little by little the bars were buckling. Now Great Dane was smiling.